U.S. Navy wants to sell off its troubled littoral combat ships to allies
taskandpurpose.com
taskandpurpose.com
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/07/littoral-com...
I guess the Coast Guard didn’t even want them?
https://maritime-executive.com/editorials/op-ed-a-derated-li...
We haven’t had a real naval battle in 40 years, arguably 80. Since that time, sensors of all types have become vastly more numerous and capable, as have missiles. I don’t see how a surface ship survives in that environment.
In a shooting war between the US and China, the US will try to establish air and sea dominance. That means in the first days or weeks of the war, it would keep away its vulnerable assets, such as non-stealth aircraft, or surface vessels that are not part of carrier strike groups. It would make use of stealth fighters and bombers, cruise missiles, and in the sea domain, submarines and carrier strike groups.
After dominance is established, all the other assets become very valuable.
If your enemy has access to satellites, long range sensors, submarines that can fire hypersonic anti-ship missiles, and modern air defense systems, then a strategy based on the assumption of air dominance will fail.
Let's also not forget that the U.S. has never achieved air dominance over any nation with sophisticated air defense systems. The last time the U.S. actually tried to fight an air war against an enemy with access to relatively modern air-defense systems was in Vietnam, where 3700 US planes were shot down (and about 5000 helicopters). Air defenses are much better now, which is why Israel - with its advanced F35s -- is so afraid of Syria's S300 systems that it only uses standoff weapons when it raids Syria, proving once again that long range missiles are what matters, and outdated concepts like "air dominance" are only relevant when the enemy is limited to RPGs and Toyota trucks.
When the US has air dominance, the only strategy to launch missiles - of any type - is shoot-and-scoot. That can work with man portable missiles like Javelin, or pickup-truck mounted missiles. But it won't work with anti ship missiles. Those you can launch from large platforms, such as huge trucks, surface vessels, ground silos, or aircraft. If the US has air dominance, all of these are as good as dead once they fire their missiles.
Hypersonic carrier-killer missiles won't work for the same reason Russian SAMs are minimally effective against western air forces: if you know where the launcher is, you tread carefully until it is destroyed. The United States has possessed the MASINT/ELINT capability to detect the location and type of practically every RF emitter in a given area from space since at least the mid-1980s.
Assuming, of course, any nation that develops hypersonic carrier cruise missiles can figure out how to steer them at a hypersonic velocity in thick air. Something extremely smart people who would make an extremely large amount of money if it was possible have told me is extremely impossible.
Land-based anti-shipping missiles won’t be in short supply in any such conflict.
“We weren’t sure LCS was executing the missions it was designed for,” Commander of Naval Surface Forces Vice Adm. Roy Kitchener said in January 2022. “And so we … went out to the number of fleet commanders and said, ‘Alright, what do you want it to do? And what missions do you want it to execute based on the environment we’re in now?’”
reminds me of this excerpt from a movie:
Pentagon Wars - Bradley Fighting Vehicle Evolution
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQ2lO3ieBA
From the movie "Pentagon Wars". Bradley Fighting Vehicle design and development. Any design engineer will love this scene.
The original concept was that fighting in a post-NBC world meant infantry would have to fight from inside a sealed area. This means the firing ports were part of the earliest designs, not added as a suggestion during the Nixon administration.
I should also note that several the very early prototypes were amphibious; I think this was mostly scratched (timeline wise) by the point where it is joked about being added in the film.
The added scout role is true, and coincides with cancellation of the ARSV, and did follow somewhat along the logic of the movie (roughly we need a fast, armored vehicle, this is a fast, armored vehicle).
Though it predates the unveiling of it, the MICV only got serious funding because of the Soviet BMP-1. The BMP-1 was used in combat before the Bradley was out of prototype stage, and had enough deficiencies that the BMP-2 was made, and the designers of the Bradley prototypes also reacted to it.
A lot of the changes were made because the development of it was slow enough (partly due to it often not being a priority) that the vision of what battlefield it would appear on changed.
The scene is very funny, and it’s an excellent story - it just happens to not be particularly accurate.
>It was never meant to be an accurate portrayal of the Bradley program and it shows. You're getting Hollywood taking an an axe-grinding, half-true memoir as fact and then playing it for laughs.
The Bradley is an interesting vehicle, and its real origin story is worth reading, just lacking in comedic value.
There is no better approach when it comes to large human organization behavior that can be implemented.
You just come to peace with that is how the world works when the population reaches a certain size.
Some over-expensive, over-engineered, over-xyz projects/trials are needed for humans to progress. Even if the specific project is eventually deemed a colossal failure, it can be pointed to as a future reference point of what not to do/waste time on.
The big barriers are getting a truly blank cheque and sufficient authority to bypass, or bulldoze, through all possible obstacles.
Which is more a question of priorities.
The Manhattan project was an exploration into a fundamental (and, without trying to sound ungenerous, a relatively simple) property of physics, put towards a relatively simple task. The laws of nature defined the constraints, and requirement was singular.
It was not an attempt to solve the constraint satisfaction problem of X stakeholders and Y requirements and Z logistical boundaries, where X, Y and Z are all in constant flux thanks to being attached to human beings who bullshit, lie, and change their minds frequently.
Your points here don't square with what I know. Have you read the Wiki page on it and found something incorrect?
We see excellent examples of this kind of project management in the automotive, semiconductor, and consumer electronics industries.
The military needs projects to be completed in a timely manner, producing systems that can keep up with or preferably beat their competitors. The automotive, semiconductor, and consumer electronics industries all have exactly the same need, and this is how it's achieved.
Modern designs are literally an order of magnitude more complex than the WW2 era, and timelines have extended accordingly. Making references to irrelevant industries doesn't help your credibility.
there, problem solved
This is a perennial big-project problem (one of the core things addressed, originally, by Agile in software), but you can’t easily quickly turn out an MVP of a warship and rapidly iterate on it.
A lot of time it doesn’t get noticed because needs move further toward the strengths of the project, or because there is a good opportunity for adaptation. But sometimes, you just get burned.
Turns out Agile depends on a low cost to refactor. It's easy to make a function body bigger. It's very painful to make an engine room bigger.
Modularity really only makes sense when you are constrained to small numbers; for example if you have limited space in your garage it might be nice to have a single machine that can serve as both a lawnmower and a snow blower - yeah it may not be the best at either and it's going to be more expensive, but it's better than having to live with just one. If there were some sort of naval treaty limiting the number of ships the US could have in its fleet, then modularity might make some sense, but for the foreseeable future no such limitation is likely to exist. The LCS was actually initiated as part of a program specifically to boost fleet size with a large number of cheap ships. It makes much more sense to use a multitude of purpose built ships.
Sure there's a chance that some of the ships you build aren't going to be needed; but then all peacetime military procurement is done in the hopes it will not wind up being needed. The LCS program took only 5 years from initial funding to the commissioning of its first ship. If they focused on maintaining the industrial capability to rapidly develop and build ships when needed, so in 35 years they can build the appropriate ship for the naval battles taking place 40 years from now, instead of trying to anticipate their needs for 40 years into the future, that would be tremendously more useful.
it is absolutely not obvious that building and then maintaining fleet of 12 different role ships is easier/cheaper than having LCS reconfigured on some bases, even if it is relatively large procedure.
> If they focused on maintaining the industrial capability to rapidly develop and build ships when needed, so in 35 years they can build the appropriate ship for the naval battles taking place 40 years from now
it is also not clear if US can maintain such capability plus logistics and training without actual fleet in place.
It very much is obvious to anyone with any familiarity. You're taking a system, adding a lot of cost and complexity to it, and not eliminating any substantial cost or complexity from the original system.
> it is also not clear if US can maintain such capability plus logistics and training without actual fleet in place.
You'd still have a fleet in place. But rather than building 10 expensive ships designed to last for 40 years, you'd build 40 cheap ships designed to last for 10 years. At any given time you have a fleet of 10 ships, but they are newer, and better optimized ships. You don't need to worry about maintaining decades old ships with a mix of out of date systems, unavailable components and haphazardly integrated upgrades that could never fully take advantage of lessons learned. You can afford to take risks because you don't need to live with mistakes for long, you make fewer mistakes because the people involved have personally done this before, if something does go awry you can nip it in the bud because you don't have large sunk costs, and since you're sending out a steady stream of work, your suppliers and partners are more concerned with maintaining a long term relationship than securing a single massive contract.
"each [StanFlex] module is housed in a stainless steel container measuring 3 metres (9.8 ft) in length, 3.5 metres (11 ft) in width, and 2.5 metres (8.2 ft) in height. ... Modules are usually installed and replaced by a 15-ton capacity mobile crane.[3] A module can be swapped out and replaced within half an hour, and after system testing completed, the ship is ready to deploy within a few hours."
There are modules for Surface,Air,Submarine, and anti-mine, storage and ELINT, among others
The LCS also suffered from the concept of minimal manning (which meant reliance upon contractors for a lot of support), and also lacked a decent set of weaponry.
Swapping out a large portion of the crew doesn't seem that uncommon? My friends in the navy get assigned deployments in a group, stay with the boat for several months and then come home and work on base for several months, etc. Often there's a significant time for the ship in port while the crew is swapped out. But, I don't get a lot of details.
> Despite that positive spin, the utility of the LCS remains hampered by its controversial mission modules, which were originally designed to be switched in and out of the hulls rapidly while in port, before the idea was abandoned, leaving each ship with a single module to be installed. As it stands, only the anti-surface warfare version of these modules is fitted on some of the hulls, with the anti-submarine warfare and mine countermeasures modules not yet available.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/42582/the-first-littor...
TFA says the motivator is lack of capabilities against China. If the LCSs can be easily retrofitted to add capabilities, why not do so?
The LCS will be gradually replaced in service by FFG-62 Constellation class frigates. During an early phase of the FFG(X) program the Navy considered using a lengthened "up gunned" variant of the LCS to meet the program requirements but quickly rejected that option as unworkable. The LCS is just a dead end.
I don't think that's the issue. LCSs are small ships which goal to do small missions which would be much more expensive to do on large ships, cruisers for example. I don't think confronting China was their goal ever.
if I understand correctly, the LCSs were built to be easily retrofitted to add capabilities, as long as none of those capabilities are any we actually need
> if I understand correctly, the LCSs were built to be easily retrofitted to add capabilities, as long as none of those capabilities are any we actually need
yes, but they were not intended to have strike capabilities, nor operate in deep sea as required to confront China in that region, that's why they called littoral.
First, they sucked up all the energy for small combatants. There was long gap between the OHP frigates and the Constellation frigates that they have started building. Frigates are much more useful warships.
Second, they decided to make two experimental designs, and then couldn't decide on design and built both. A lot of the problems could have been solved by combining designs and being more conservative with production version.
Third, the concept of them being for near shore never made sense. They are really multi-mission corvettes which is standard and popular type of ship. I think frigates are more useful for US and would have been better option.
They failed to anticipate a world where a peer, or at least near-peer, naval force is rapidly ramping up to scale (the PLAN).